The USA seems to have visited a tattoo parlour since my last visit, and McDonalds seems to be on a general decline if various unsuccessful searches in San Francisco and the airports I visited are anything to go by. But asides from almost everyone having ink on some part of their body and a lack of Golden Arches whenever I most needed one, nothing has really changed in America, it never really does. The car is still king (especially if its got 4WD and is the size of a bus), and America is still a country I would like a lot more if some of the Americans that live in it did not live in it.
The US does a lot of things extremely well (maintaining its National Parks, providing free soft drink refills and selling petrol at an acceptable price being a few examples), but they also do a lot of things not quite so well, like breeding a lot of people with an artifically inflated level of self-confidence for example.
